C L I F F O R D G E E RT Z

COURTESY OF THE INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY. © RANDALL HAGADORN

23 august 1926 . 30 october 2006

PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY VOL. 154, NO. 1, MARCH 2010
 biographical memoirs

C LIFFORD GEERTZ, professor emeritus and the original

founding member of the School of Social Science at the In-
stitute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, died on
30 October 2006 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as a result of complica-
tions following heart surgery. He was elected to the American Philosoph-
ical Society in 1972. Clifford Geertz was arguably the most influential
American cultural anthropologist of the second half of the twentieth
century. In many ways he gave definition to the more humanistic side
of that discipline’s research agenda.
Aside from his obvious brilliance, literary skills, and intellectual
energy, Cliff was a private man who became a public intellectual. He
was a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, where
he was the voice of cultural anthropology to a cosmopolitan reader-
ship. He was also an unpretentious, even somewhat introverted, man,
who was skittish and halting yet also riveting and dazzling in interper-
sonal encounters and whose company it was great fun to keep. Those
who encountered him with any depth or frequency came to realize that
he abhorred the use of theory-laden abstractions, disliked labels, and
would have liked nothing better than to defy classification by colleagues
and friends. Even as he became legendary in academic circles for his
verbal intelligence (as well as for his research skills), he would surely
never have thought of himself as a conversationalist. Nevertheless, his
capacity to produce spontaneous yet meticulously wrought and pene-
trating commentaries on almost any conceivable cultural theme, high
or low, was widely acknowledged and delighted in throughout his
many academic networks. And, then, of course, there was his dexter-
ity with dethroning witticisms (“relax and enjoy it ethnocentrism”)
and entertaining deposing sallies, which was in evidence not only in
his writings but also in informal conversation. I suspect he not only
relished a good quip, but also believed in the wisdom of a well-timed
wisecrack.
With due respect to Cliff’s antipathy for academic pigeonholes, I
think it is fair to say that he was a robust cultural pluralist who was
suspicious of all grand and sweeping theories of human behavior. He
believed that cultural diversity was inherent in the human condition
and that the ecumenical or missionary impulse to value uniformity over
variety and to overlook, devalue, or even eradicate difference was not a
good thing. Based on his reading of history and his ethnographic
knowledge of the current global multicultural scene, he viewed it as ev-
ident that cultural differences between groups—sustained by powerful
origin stories, historical narratives, religious symbols, and imagined
primordial ties to one’s own ancestral spirits—are ever-present, robust,
and resilient, a fact about which he had no regrets.
[ 88 ]
clifford geertz 89

Although Clifford Geertz described himself as an “anti anti-relativist”

in a famous Distinguished Lecture by that name delivered in 1983 to
the members of the American Anthropological Association, he was not
himself a radical relativist, although, despite the care with which he ar-
ticulated his views, he was often mistakenly labeled as such. Indeed, he
believed that “relativism disables judgment,” just as he believed that
“absolutism” removes judgment from history. He believed in critical
judgment, but only when it did not pretend to be context-free.
Indeed, when Clifford Geertz took the measure of primordial group
identities, anxieties, hostilities, and fears in the contemporary world,
and the associated political disorder, his assessment of various extant
multicultural realities (domestic and global) was not necessarily pretty.
His words (and critical judgment) on this matter are haunting: “The
image of a world full of people so passionately fond of each other’s cul-
tures that they aspire only to celebrate one another does not seem to
me a clear and present danger,” he wrote, “the image of one full of peo-
ple happily apotheosizing their heroes and diabolizing their enemies
alas does.”
He was mindful that we live in an age when political and market-
place transactions (including competition for jobs, land, natural re-
sources), both domestic and international, produce fateful (and some-
times destructive) encounters between members of ancestrally distinct
groups, resulting in the mutual demonizing of the “other.” “Position-
ing Muslims in France, Whites in South Africa, Arabs in Israel, or Ko-
reans in Japan are not altogether the same sort of thing,” he noted.
“But if political theory is going to be of any relevance at all in the splin-
tered world, it will have to have something cogent to say about how, in
the face of a drive towards a destructive integrity, such structures can
be brought into being, how they can be sustained, and how they can be
made to work.”
There are many well-known facts about Cliff’s career. His collec-
tion of essays Available Light opens with an autobiographical address,
“Passage and Accident: A Life of Learning,” delivered to the American
Council of Learned Societies in 1999. The G.I. bill (which he refers to,
with characteristic wit, as the “degreeing of America”) launched him
into academia, where, as he puts it, he just kept catching the right wave.
He went from Antioch College (“the reigning attitude, Jewish, all irony,
impatience and auto-critique”), to the Department of Social Relations
at Harvard (“a gathering of fugitives from traditional departments”),
to the University of Chicago, where he became a major voice of the
symbolic or interpretive anthropology movement of the 1960s. For an
instructive collection of his essays in symbolic or interpretive anthro-
pology, which stands as the culmination of his Chicago-era thinking,
90 biographical memoirs

and where he first made use of the expression “thick description,” with
which his style of ethnographic writing is associated, one need only read
his book The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
He intended that title as an allusion to Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation
of Dreams. He later published further essays in interpretive anthropol-
ogy under the title Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
In the discourse of symbolic or interpretive anthropology a symbol
is anything—an action, a practice, an object, a pattern of sounds, a cre-
mation ceremony, the gathering together of people to share a meal—
that is a vehicle of meaning. The goal of interpretive analysis is to spell
out the implicit or unstated presuppositions, implications, or “mean-
ings” (the goals, values, and pictures of the world) that make this or
that action, practice, object, or pattern of sounds intelligible to mem-
bers of some culture or interpretive community in some specified con-
text. “Thick description” is the process of spelling out the context-
dependent meanings of, for example, a specific action or activity such
as the Balinese cockfight. (One of Cliff’s most famous essays is titled
“Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight.”) In other words, for
Geertz, human beings not only do things with words; they also say
things with their actions; and that is what makes the (particular) lives
they lead symbolic. His symbolic anthropology is thus about the inter-
pretive analysis of behavior by reference to ideas or concepts made
manifest or expressed through action.
Always a fugitive from every academic pigeonhole, Cliff felt most
at home during his University of Chicago years in the interdisciplinary
Committee on the Comparative Study of New Nations, which he
helped put on the map during the 1960s. Several of his most seminal
papers, including “Religion as a Cultural System,” “The Impact of the
Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man,” and “The Integrative
Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States,”
were written during this time.
The next and final wave he caught was to the Institute for Advanced
Study in Princeton, where in 1970 he helped found the School of Social
Science and became the cultural anthropologist in residence. During
several productive decades at the Institute he engaged with historians,
philosophers, legal scholars, and literary critics. And he wrote many in-
fluential books, including Islam Observed: Religious Development in
Morocco and Indonesia (New Haven: Yale University Press), Negara:
The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1980), and Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as
Author (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). He retired, as pro-
fessor emeritus at the Institute, in the year 2000, and remained in situ
until his death.
clifford geertz 91

In a commentary published not long before his death, Cliff gives an

account of his life more personal (and more revealing of his youthful
years) than the one in his ACLS autobiographical address. He portrays
his work and life as “a looking for small bits of order to hang onto in
the midst of chaos.” He writes,
So it is hardly to wonder that my work looks like a grasping for pat-
terns in a swirl of change: I was preadapted. My parents were di-
vorced when I was three, and I was dispatched (the verb is appropri-
ate) to live alone with an older woman, a nonrelative, amid the sylvan
beauties of the Northern California countryside (a “nonvillage” of
three or four hundred farmers, shopkeepers and summer visitors) [he
is speaking of an area in Marin County] in the plumb depths of the
Great Depression. I was well cared for, and that’s about it, and I was
pretty much left to put my life together (not without real help from
schoolteachers responding to a bright kid, and, later on, the U.S. Navy,
responding to a callow klutz) by myself. Without going on . . . all this
predisposed me to becoming, in both life and work, the seeker after a
pattern, however fragmentary, amid a swirl of accident, however per-
vasive. . . . It has never occurred to me, not really being a deep thinker,
just a nervous one, to try to resolve this “binary.” I have just sought to
live with it. Pitched early into things, I assumed, and I still assume,
that what you are supposed to do is keep going with whatever you
can find lying about to keep going with: to get from yesterday to to-
day without foreclosing tomorrow.
In some of his best-known work Cliff Geertz searched for patterns
by conducting field work in Indonesia (at sites in Bali, Java, and Suma-
tra) and in Morocco. Early in his career, and again during the last de-
cade of his life, he tried to make sense out of the complex and chaotic
relationships between globalization and the revitalization of local “pri-
mordial” identities in a world “growing both more global and more di-
vided, more thoroughly interconnected and more intricately parti-
tioned, at the same time.”
What he accomplished in this regard was concrete and substantial.
He helped us imagine how it is possible for morally sensitive and intel-
lectually reasonable members of the divergent cultural lineages in the
human family to live their lives guided by goals, values, and pictures of
the world very different from our own. His writings sought to show us
how it is possible for normal members of other cultural worlds or na-
tions to live their lives piloted by different conceptions of the self, of
gender, of morality, of emotions, of religion, of political and legal au-
thority, of property, of kinship, or even different conceptions of time,
space, causation, and the good life.
His version of cultural pluralism was one in which he sought to
understand others as coequal moral subjects (rather than as defective
92 biographical memoirs

moral subjects or as mere objects); and to do so without assuming that if

two cultural traditions are moral equals, then their goals, values, pictures
of the world, and ways of life must be uniform or essentially the same.
He sought to do this while fully recognizing that there may be times
when tolerance comes to an end. His work stands in contrast to those
traditions of scholarship that either view the variety of human societies
as a developmental story about the ultimate universal ascendancy of
Western civilization or else have little interest in cultural and historical
variety in the first place, and try instead to induce essential laws of
human nature that hold across all of history and all known societies.
Clifford Geertz was not only a robust cultural pluralist. He was
also a political liberal, although a nervous one, who was aware that a
major cause of what he called the “drive towards a destructive integ-
rity” in the modern world was the ethno-nationalist impulse to disaggre-
gate or dismantle multicultural states and resolve them into a world
of political communities in which nation, people, state, and country,
culture and politics—are made to coincide. Exercising his critical judg-
ment, he once described resistance to ethno-nationalism as a “moral
imperative.” Not very far from the surface of his writings on this sub-
ject is his clear and considered judgment about the worthiness of a dis-
tinctively American political conception of nationality: a conception of
the nation as a “civil political community.” In that conception all peo-
ple, regardless of their ethnic, racial, or religious origins, who are citi-
zens of the state and are willing to live their lives constrained by a basic
set of liberal democratic principles (what Geertz described as the “law,
government, and public comportment”) are part of the nation.
Geertz, however, was acutely aware that critics of political liberal-
ism around the world often argue that liberals (including Geertz him-
self) are prevented precisely because of their liberal commitments (for
example, to the ideals of autonomy, equal life chances, and the freedoms
of expression, association, and choice) from celebrating (or from even
tolerating) cultural differences, especially when those cultural divides
or separations are sustained by means of primordial ties to ancestral
groups. As a robust cultural pluralist and a dedicated political liberal
he found it troubling to see such critics argue, as he put it in one brief
but effective summary of their views, that political liberals are barred
by their own liberal principles “from recognizing the force and durabil-
ity of ties of religion, language, custom, locality, race, and descent in
human affairs, or from regarding the entry of such considerations into
civic life as other than pathological, primitive, backward, regressive,
and irrational.”
So he offered up a challenge: Can anthropologists, political philos-
ophers, and globalization theorists develop a version of liberalism with
clifford geertz 93

both the courage and the capacity to engage itself with “a differenced
world”? And can they do so with regard to, and respect for, a multi-
cultural world in which at least some of that diversity has its source in
the primordial ties of individuals to kith and kin and particular ances-
tral histories, and not in some original autobiographical act of free
choice or expressive liberty?
Cliff Geertz died before he was able fully to spell out his own af-
firmative response to his own questions. Nevertheless, in some ways
his most significant legacy is his invitation to those of us for whom his
voice was resonant to rethink the implications of political liberalism.
It is a summons to search for a practical philosophical antidote to the
“diabolizing” of others and, thus, to develop a way of thinking about
the reality and organization of ethnic, religious, and racial differences
in the contemporary world that, even though it might fall short of get-
ting us to actually celebrate diversity, might at the very least support
an attitude of cooperative mutual sufferance among culturally distinct
groups. I have no doubt that Cliff would critically judge that attitude
of mutual sufferance to be a great achievement.
Clifford Geertz is survived by his wife, Karen Blu, a cultural anthro-
pologist whom he married in 1987. He is survived as well by his first
wife, Hildred Geertz (also a well-known anthropologist), who is profes-
sor emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at Princeton Univer-
sity and collaborated with him in his work on Indonesia; and by two
children from his first marriage, Erika Reading of Princeton, and Benja-
min, of Kirkland, Washington; and two grandchildren.

Elected 1972

Richard A. Shweder
William Claude Reavis Distinguished Service Professor
Department of Comparative Human Development
University of Chicago

Clifford Geertz’s full curriculum vitae as of 2002, including a list of his publications, is
available at this Web site address: http://www.infoamerica.org/documentos_pdf/geertz02.pdf.